Generation game: the influence of Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios

Interview: Peter Clegg

Blueprint: Arts and crafts was a significant part of Feilden Clegg Bradley Studio’s early history, not least with the Bedales’ Olivier Theatre. How important is making and the skills associated with the crafts?

Peter Clegg: As part of the design process making is absolutely essential, and an extension of this is to work physically on your own building, which helps feedback into the design process. It’s an iterative process and helps develop different ways of thinking. I suppose I have always been interested in the romantic side of the arts and crafts movement but with an acknowledgement that it is indeed indulgent and romantic. William Morris himself (certainly later in life) was as interested in the political and social aspects of arts and crafts as he was in the actual arts and crafts themselves. So my version of craftwork — the ‘making’ of the kind of things I do in my garden — I regard as self-indulgent and therapeutic. I guess I think the same goes for some of our architecture projects like The Observatory and the making of the theatre at Bedales. Great if you can afford to do it! It’s not going to change the world of architecture though.

Peter CleggPeter Clegg

I guess my conclusion is that arts and crafts is a means to an end; using craft in its broadest sense with real integrity is a useful way to develop an approach to architecture that comes from understanding true materiality. Frank Lloyd Wright understood this and Louis Kahn when he talked about what the material ‘wanted to be’. So I remember for instance getting interested in producing rainwater hoppers in specially castfibre cement at the Iona project in the Eighties and thereby getting to understand what could be done with the material manufacturing process. It’s similar in ways with what we’ve done using digital technologies for the decorative concrete columns at Manchester School of Art. And that tradition is really alive and well in the practice.

Olivier Theatre oak frame. Image Credit: Dennis Gilbert / View PicturesOlivier Theatre oak frame. Image Credit: Dennis Gilbert / View Pictures

A lot of the work we are doing at the moment involves the casting of ‘decorative’ elements on our buildings — an underlying idea that is definitely encouraged by the new digital equipment we have that enables us to reproduce ideas very quickly. So the old ‘romantic’ dependence on hand/eye connectivity isn’t absolutely necessary… except you might say for therapeutic reasons. At our recent away-day we took a show of hands from the whole office of how many people were involved with physical modelling (about 30 per cent) and how many who weren’t would like to be (about another 50 per cent). There is a huge surge of interest in physical model-making that I think is a direct response to immersion in the digital 3D world.

How do you view the new Bedales’ Arts & Design building in relation to your original Olivier Theatre building of the Nineties, where you seemed to very consciously invoke the arts and crafts tradition, and that of Bedales in particular?

Olivier Theatre oak frame. Image Credit: Dennis Gilbert / View PicturesOlivier Theatre oak frame. Image Credit: Dennis Gilbert / View Pictures

It is a reworking of that tradition and, like the theatre, a reimagining of a vernacular. It was originally planned as a timber structure but budget cuts forced us into a steel frame which we don’t regret — it has become an exercise in honest 20th-century barn vernacular rather than the more traditionally jointed timber-frame buildings that characterised the previous school buildings. And we generated a working balcony at first-floor level behind a slatted timber shading screen — reminiscent of the boarding on agricultural barns but with a decorative overlay. Staff and pupils from Bedales were very involved, certainly as they were in the previous building. The school is really extraordinary in what it does there, with the idea of ‘making’ such a vital part of their educational offer.

the Art & Design Building screen. Image Credit: Hufton + CrowThe Art & Design Building screen. Image Credit: Hufton + Crow

Bedales was completed soon after — Manchester School of Art. Do you see that aspects of making, and arts and crafts, are part of the Manchester project?

Manchester School of Art is essentially a big art shed for creative education. The head of school there, Professor David Crow, was a very strong guy — extraordinary and imaginative.

He could see what could be done by using a new building to develop an integrative and holistic philosophy of art education, which has been born out post-completion.

We reflected the school’s and city’s industrial history in some aspects of the building. For example, early on in the project we found this archive of decorative wallpaper designs from 1876, by Lewis Day, the school’s first principal. Tom Jarman’s team worked with a whole load of artists and craftspeople to turn this into a decorative finish on some of the concrete columns in the new building. That process I suppose was a bit like the casting of a bronze from an artist’s initial sketches and models. This included our model making and the digital technology people in our Bath office, the translation of that into a formwork liner with specialists based in Germany, and working closely with contractors and concrete subcontractors on site.

The Observatory, which is currently at Buckler’s Hard, Beaulieu in the New Forest National park until June. Image Credit: Feilden Clegg Bradley StudiosThe Observatory, which is currently at Buckler’s Hard, Beaulieu in the New Forest National park until June. Image Credit: Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios

There’s a kind of dissonance in those concrete pillars, which is craft at an industrial scale. Without the CNC machine though we wouldn’t have this fine detail in the concrete formwork. We ended up using concrete to create these pillars of lace. I still cling to the belief that craft is relevant with digital technology. Can digital technology take the place of the manual traditions in the arts and crafts? I would say yes — it’s just another type of technology. But hand-working of materials is a way of exercising the creative link between brain and body.

You and Richard Feilden were caught up with the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement and living self-sufficiently for the first years of Feilden Clegg. Why did that period come to an end for you?

Our generation was perhaps one of the most romantic, with the back-to-the-land, John Seymour’s self-sufficiency philosophy, and doing our own building work. We were only interested in doing this on a small scale. I have a slight sense of guilt as I think I got a bit bored of it after a while. Moving away was partly about growing up and partly that we felt we had something more to offer. I began to think, ‘How do we take this and make it into something new and more relevant?’ We were still in the throes of our ‘building’ phase with our own building and development companies, and it was about looking for a way that would lead to something new and different, after 10 years of practice.

It was a holistic lifestyle, family, kids and work — including milking cows by hand. Maybe I copped out a little bit. I did the self-sufficiency thing for about 10 years or so.

What do you make of this new generation of young architects, which has embraced the maker culture in various ways, that also seems to hark back to aspects of early-era FeildenClegg?

Some of what this generation is doing is similar. They share the values that we had then, and they are interested in the same things — but differently! Some of the younger staff at FCBS is absolutely obsessed with materials and building, in a really good way. The Observatory is an example of that. Fergus Feilden, now at FeildenFowles, is obsessed with building. We build together — proving your point about history repeating itself. The similarities are very strong. Matt and Nicola with Stonewood Design have headed along that way doing ‘the rural thing’ in Castle Combe.

The Observatory, which is currently at Buckler’s Hard, Beaulieu in the New Forest National park until June. Image Credit: Feilden Clegg Bradley StudiosThe Observatory, which is currently at Buckler’s Hard, Beaulieu in the New Forest National park until June. Image Credit: Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios

Integrating creativity and the arts into education has been very important to you and the school work done by FCBS. How can one bring what an independent school, like Bedales does, into the state sector?

I’d give the example of Plymouth School of the Creative Arts. We haven’t really dealt with radical pedagogy except at Plymouth and Bedales. And Plymouth was done on one of the lowest budgets of our state schools yet, finding imaginative solutions that have helped with delivering the project.

Generally it’s become much more difficult, run from the Education Funding Agency with a 60 per cent cut in the cost per pupil of new schools over the past five years and no flexibility at all in either the funding or what you can do.

At Plymouth the head is Dave Strudwick, and he has been amazing. The school is right up there in terms of performance and achievement and the level of creativity is fantastic. A lot of this depends on the teachers, and particularly the head teacher, I’m afraid.

Cooking for instance, or what we used to call domestic science or food technology, at Plymouth has been retitled culinary arts, and they teach it in an extraordinary way as well. Often it’s taught in French! And in one class, it was decided they’d be cooking for astronauts, which they did — the children and the teachers cooking together. And it’s really high-class cuisine.

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